


In an Empty House

by mombasas



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reality Show, Ghosts, M/M, Paranormal Investigators, Past Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-12
Updated: 2018-01-12
Packaged: 2019-03-03 10:29:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13339341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mombasas/pseuds/mombasas
Summary: When Danny Williams was a kid he wanted to be a cop, a major league baseball player, a lion – nice, normal things, and instead? Instead, he got GHOST QUEST, SyFy’s newest breakout hit, already renewed for a second season even though it’s only halfway through its initial run. Entertainment Weekly describes it, Danny knows, as “Tropical Ghost Adventures”; TV Guide calls it “Ghost Hunters with fewer plumbers and more pineapples,” and the write-up in People was mostly about Chin Ho’s bone structure and barely mentioned ghosts at all.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a hugely self-indulgent Ghost Adventures AU that has been sitting on my computer for nearly 2 years now. It is time I let it go. Warnings for implied (not actually described) past violence to a child.

2:24 PM – EXT. 147 MOCKINGBIRD COURT.

The house is abandoned, a two-story suburban home in a long row of similarly-dilapidated houses backed by a stretch of woods. Its shingles are weathered; the short driveway is cracked, thick weeds choking up from the ground beneath.

Steve is standing on the overgrown lawn, hands tucked into his pockets while he talks into the camera Lori’s balancing on one shoulder. “We’re here at 147 Mockingbird Court today, to do a little investigating about what’s behind some of the stories we’ve heard about this place. Witnesses claim to experience a dark, unsettling force, which isn’t surprising, with the history of the house. Tonight, we’ll lock ourselves in and try to get some evidence about what’s really going on in there,” he continues. There’s a beat of silence. “Uh.” He looks at Lori. “Intro?”

Lori shrugs the shoulder not pinned by the equipment. “Might as well,” she says. “We can always cut it later.”

Steve nods, refocusing, and clears his throat. “With me today,” he tells the camera, “is investigator Danny Williams.” Lori pans the camera over to where Danny and Kono are unloading the van.

Danny gives it a short wave before shouldering a heavy equipment bag. “Whenever you’re done flexing at the camera, Gigantor, feel free to help,” he shouts across to Steve. Steve grins and flips him off cheerfully from where the camera can’t see.

"We’ve also got Kono Kalakaua,” he says, watching Lori pivot and zoom in on Kono, who smiles brightly as she hefts a computer monitor. She shoots a shaka sign towards them. “Kono’s the rookie of the team,” says Steve, “but she’s been tagging along unofficially for a while now, so I know she does great work. Equipment tech Lori Weston’s behind the camera right now, and our audio-visual guy Chin Ho Kelly is already inside, wrapping up the research we’ve got on the place. Let’s go see what he’s got for us,” he says, heading into the house.

In the driveway, Danny drops a bag on his foot and curses creatively. Lori makes a note to tell the postproduction guys to cut that part out. Danny hates it when Grace hears him swear, even when it’s beeps.

 

DANNY, 2:30 PM – EXT. 147 MOCKINGBIRD CT.

Here’s the thing. Danny never wanted to join a paranormal investigatory team, okay, that was not on his list of potential career options. When he was a kid he wanted to be a cop, a major league baseball player, a lion – nice, _normal_ things, and instead? Instead, he got _GHOST QUEST_ , SyFy’s newest breakout hit, already renewed for a second season even though it’s only halfway through its initial run. _Entertainment Weekly_ describes it, Danny knows, as “Tropical _Ghost Adventures_ ”; _TV Guide_ calls it “ _Ghost Hunters_ with fewer plumbers and more pineapples,” and the write-up in _People_ was mostly about Chin Ho’s bone structure and barely mentioned ghosts at all.

Danny knows this because he receives copies of each article in triplicate; one from his mother, sent with love, another from his younger sister, sent with malicious glee (she likes to highlight the most embarrassing parts), and one pinned to the corkboard in their offices by Kono, squeezed between scattered Polaroids of the team, memos marked IMPORTANT that generally go ignored, and a post-it note with the running tally of phone numbers received by each team member. So far, Chin is winning, but Kono’s a close second. Danny blames freakish family genetics.

Anyway. The point is, Danny never planned on spending his relatively few years on this earth lurking around old abandoned properties, tripping over debris and talking to himself, but here he is, thanks to some massive kind of cosmic injustice. It’s a toxic cocktail of unforeseen events including, but not limited to,

  1. his divorce
  2. his ex-wife’s subsequent remarriage and move to Hawai’i with his daughter
  3. a drug bust gone wrong at home in Newark, which resulted in a blown knee and an early retirement from the police force
  4. the overall state of the US job market, and
  5. Lieutenant Commander Steven J. McGarrett’s complete inability to take “no” for an answer.



As jobs go, Danny grudgingly admits, it could definitely be worse. The hours are flexible, the pay is surprisingly good, his team is comprised of total nutjobs (but they’re professional nutjobs, which somehow makes a difference), and, maybe most importantly, Gracie thinks it’s the coolest job in the entire world. Danny did the whole paranormal thing back in Jersey, too, on a much smaller scale – what Steve’s running here was big even before SyFy got ahold of it. It had just been Steve and Chin, at first, before Danny moved to the islands and they roped Kono in, but they’d already had a reputation. Still do, in fact; Hawai’i has a complicated history with a range of spiritual beliefs to go along with it. Chin and Kono tend to take point when they’re contacted to check out sites connected to native beliefs, and Steve’s always been happy to let them. It’s one of the reasons their clients range from mainlanders with vacation homes to families that have been on the island for generations. It’s rare for the network to have to scout out locations for them to investigate; most of the time, the owners reach out to them.

Back east, Danny mostly stuck to helping out friends of friends, hooking up with the Jersey Paranormal Society when they were in a real squeeze. He doesn’t care for the gadgets and gizmos, has never had much use for them; he’s not fanatical about finding proof like some of his buddies are. Danny figures that what’s out there is out there, whether you believe in it or not. Danny’s believed since he was eight, when he and Matty were fooling around on a disused section of the boardwalk and he spent ten minutes talking to a busker that Matty couldn’t see.

He’s always been emotional, wears his many feelings on his sleeve, doesn’t keep much back. Rachel loves to bring that up. It was one of her favorite barbs during the divorce – Danny doesn’t know how to do anything halfway, can’t settle, doesn’t like to compromise. She’s not wrong. Danny listens to what his heart tells him, and it made him a great cop, a better father, and, depending on Steve’s mood, either “a valuable member of this team” or “the most irritating man I have ever worked with in my entire life.”

 

STEVE, 2:49 PM – KITCHEN.

Chin’s already got the rickety table covered in files, sheaves of paper spread out across its scarred surface and peppered with photos, news clippings, and post-it notes. Steve braces his hands on the edge and looks down, taking in the images.

“Monica and William Diaz,” Chin says, using two fingers to slide a particularly gory crime scene photo towards Steve and Kono. “Haoles, murdered back in ‘03 by this guy.” He rifles through a stack of papers, selecting a glossy mug shot and what looks like a still taken from a courtroom security feed. “Ryan Webster, who was serving life for the murders until last year, when his cellmate got him alone in the showers and beat him to death.” Steve feels Danny come up next to him as he looks between the photos. The victims are sprawled in bed, and after a moment Steve realizes that the rumpled sheets surrounding them are white, stained with so much drying blood that they appear black. “Monica was stabbed sixteen times, William twenty-nine.”

“Jesus,” says Danny. “That’s personal.”

“Why’d Webster kill ‘em?” Kono asks.

Steve tears his eyes away from the photos. Chin’s face is set, his lips thin. “Ex-boyfriend of Monica’s, did a dime in Halawa for aggravated assault and armed robbery. When he got out, she was married to William and they had a five-year-old daughter. Webster decided that wasn’t how the story was supposed to end.”

Danny looks up sharply. “What happened to the kid?”

“Nobody knows, except maybe Ryan Webster, and he never talked. Not about that, anyway; apparently he bragged about everything else,” Chin says. “She wasn’t on the property when HPD got there the next morning, and Webster made it three days on the run before they tracked him down, holed up alone in a cheap motel on Moloka’i. She could be anywhere.” Steve knows, and knows that Danny knows, that Chin’s not talking about the girl like she’s alive. In his peripheral vision, Steve sees Danny’s hand tighten into a fist and then relax by his side.

“What was her name?” Danny asks quietly.

“Emily,” says Chin. “Emily Diaz.” He passes them a photo.

The child is small for her age, all brown hair and wide, dark eyes. Her skin is paler than Grace’s, and she’s looking seriously into the camera, which Danny’s kid has never done in her life, but Steve knows Danny’s seeing the resemblance anyway. He presses the outside of his arm into Danny’s own.

 

STEVE, 5:58 PM – KITCHEN.

They’ve just finished up the witness interviews, and Steve’s giving the camera the same summary he does for every investigation while Kono and Chin finish setting up the equipment.

“Witnesses say they feel threatened just stepping foot into the house, and some people actually report that they’ve been pushed and pinched, especially in the master bedroom upstairs, and in the basement.” Danny nods seriously, as if this isn’t the sixth time he’s heard the facts in the last three hours, but there’s a degree of thinly-veiled impatience in the movement. Steve knows how he feels; lingering over interviews and camera shots and rehashing information always feels like a waste of their time, but good ratings mean they can continue to do this full-time.

“So we’ve got x-cameras set up in those two spots, as well as one going down the hallway out here,” Danny says, gesturing, “and, uh, one in Emily’s room, just in case. Chin’s going to be holding down the fort in the guest bedroom and keeping an eye on those.”

“Hopefully we’ll be able to get some answers,” Steve says. “Earlier we spoke with Ailani, the real estate agent who’s been trying to sell the property for years with no success, because of all the stories.”

“Yeah, I’m sure that’s why it’s not selling,” Danny interrupts, nudging a cabinet with his foot. The door falls off and clatters onto the floor. Steve rolls his eyes.

“Maybe tonight we’ll be able to set some of those stories to rest,” he continues pointedly, “and give some comfort, or something, to whoever’s still here.”

“What, what is that?”

Steve sighs. “What, Danny, what is what.”

“That tone. What’s ‘or something,’ huh?”

“I don’t have a tone. _You_ have a tone, you use it with me daily.”

“It’s the same tone I use with my nine-year-old, and do you know why?” Steve knows better than to try to answer. “I will tell you why. Because working with you is like working with a nine-year-old, except my kid is better-behaved. Steven, there will be no ‘or something’ tonight, do you understand me? I have plans this weekend, _real_ plans, and no, before you ask, they do not involve skulking around graveyards, running the circumference of the island, or bench-pressing sharks. I refuse to screw up _another_ weekend just because you never learned impulse control as a child, okay, I cannot take my beautiful, perfect, _well-behaved_ daughter to see _Moana_ for the fifth time if I am in the hospital again.”

Steve blinks. “The tetanus thing was one time, it’s not my fault your vaccination was out of date. And I don’t bench-press sharks.” He wonders if Lori’s still recording, or if she’s just watching the show.

Danny leans back against the counter, crossing his arms. “I think you’ll try, now that I’ve given you the idea.” Steve frowns, makes a show of considering it before opening his mouth. Danny interrupts him. “Just once, okay, _once_ , I want to make it through a lockdown without someone” – he glares towards Steve, who holds his hands up defensively – “insulting, goading, taunting, or otherwise antagonizing a spirit. Eight hours of civil, polite language. Can we do that, do you think, huh?” Steve comes back at him with that intentionally blank, dead-eyed stare he knows Danny hates.

“Sure, Danno, of course,” he says, in a tone that clearly implies that Danny’s crazy for reacting this way. “No insults this time,” Steve says. “I promise.”

 

DANNY, 9:54 PM – BASEMENT.

Danny has made one fatal miscalculation, which is that he’s forgotten that Steve’s particular brand of insanity is contagious.

“Why are you such an asshole?” Kono asks loudly. Lori swings the camera around in time to catch Danny’s shoulders slump and his left hand come up to pinch at the bridge of his nose. “You think it’s fun to hit people?” Kono continues. Danny can’t see shit in the darkness of the basement, but he knows her hip is cocked like it always is when she’s feeling punchy. “Come on then, hit me, motherfucker.” She waits, expectant. Lori stays perfectly still, camera trained on both of them, and Danny is silent, fingers tight around the EVP recorder. He counts to twenty before speaking up himself.

“Can you tell us your name? Just talk into this thing in my hand, alright? We want to know who’s here.” The darkness around them is total; Danny’s eyes are unfocused, staring off into the middle distance, and the hair on his arms is prickling. The blackness that surrounds them has a real, tangible weight, pressing in close. He hears Lori swallow, Kono shift her weight, his own pounding heartbeat, and then – two loud thuds, in quick succession, from somewhere to their left.

“Jesus fuck,” Kono yelps, swearing again in Hawai’ian. Danny spares a moment to feel sympathy for Mike, the guy who usually gets stuck bleeping out half their dialogue in postproduction.

“Lori, did you –”

“Yeah, I got it,” Lori replies quickly.

“Thank you,” he says, louder, to the darkness. “But, uh, that is not a name, my friend. That is a knock, which is almost as good. Can you do it again?” They wait in silence for another five minutes, and ask more questions after that, but the basement is quiet, and whatever made the back of his neck tingle has vanished. 

 

STEVE, 10:14 PM – UPSTAIRS HALLWAY, MASTER BEDROOM.

“It’s Steve, I’m, um, I’m alone here, heading into the bedroom on the second floor where the murders took place.” Steve turns the handheld camera to point at his own face for a moment, catching a glimpse of his eyes, alien and white in the night-vision glow. “I promised Danny that we’ll play nice for this lockdown, so I’m just gonna head in and see what happens.” He moves slowly down the hallway, keeps his right hand trailing lightly along the wall until he comes to the door he’s looking for. Before he enters, he unclips the radio from his belt and hails Chin, who’s watching the static cameras from their base camp in the guest bedroom.

“Chin, it’s Steve,” he says. “How are the others doing?”

“They’re fine, brah,” Chin’s staticky voice comes through. “Got a few unexplained thumps but nothing too crazy.”

“Copy,” Steve says, clipping the radio back to his cargoes and easing the door open. Weak moonlight filters in through the windows. The room is dusty and mostly empty of furniture. A large bed frame takes up most of the space, devoid of its mattress; one rickety dresser sags against the far wall.

He closes the door firmly behind him, leaning against it a moment to hear it click into place before crossing to sit gingerly on the side of the iron bed frame. “Hi,” he says to the empty room. “My name’s Steve, I’m just here to talk.” He pans the camera around the room; there’s no movement, no sound other than his own controlled breathing. “I know something really bad happened here in this room, a long time ago. And I know that something in here’s been scaring the people who come to this house now.” Silence. “If there’s something here, if there’s someone, can you give me a sign?”

He waits for a long few minutes, is shifting minutely when he catches the sound: a single soft click. The door is, slowly, opening. “I shut that all the way when I came in,” he murmurs, aiming his camera at the door and praying that the static cam perched against the wall behind the bed is catching its movement. The door stops moving smoothly, now wide open. A bead of sweat trickles down his back, which makes no sense, as the temperature has definitely dropped by a few degrees since he came in. “It’s, uh, it’s really feeling – heavy, I guess. The air. There’s definitely…” Steve fishes the Mel meter out of his pocket, twisting the dial until it flickers into life. He usually leaves the gadgets to Chin and Kono, but he’s glad he has it with him now; it’s reading 64 degrees, which is pretty damn compelling since it’s a hot, sticky August night outside. He shows the temperature readout to the camera, wishing he’d thought to take a baseline EMF reading. It’s showing 3.2 volts, which isn’t nothing. He balances the meter on the frame next to him, raising the radio to his mouth.

“Chin, tell me you saw that door.”

“Yeah, the x-cam caught it perfectly,” Chin replies. “No draft?”

“I heard it click shut when I came in,” Steve says, but gets to his feet to check anyway. He’s speaking quietly; the air around him still feels weighty, loaded, and a quick glance at the Mel meter shows that the EMF readout is now at a 4.1. “EMF spikes,” he whispers for the camera, approaching the door. “I’m just gonna – ” he reaches out his arm and his fingertips brush against the wood of the door for an instant before it slams shut with a bang so loud it feels like it shakes the whole house.

Steve swears and jerks back, almost tripping over his own feet in his scramble away from the door. His radio bursts into life, Danny’s voice loud and his Jersey accent thick like it always gets when he’s agitated.

“Steven, what the fuck was that,” he says. “Are you okay? Jesus, I’m coming up.”

“Danny, I’m fine,” Steve says quickly. His heart is racing and he side-eyes the Mel meter; the EMF detector reads 6.5 volts. “It was just the door. And don’t swear, I thought we were trying to be polite this week.”

“Your protégé already ruined the streak, babe,” Danny says. He sounds marginally less frantic. “She made it about six minutes, you two can blow something up in celebration later. Are you sure you’re okay up there?” 

“Yeah, yeah, I’m good,” Steve says. “I’m gonna keep going.”

“Alright. I’m gonna head back to base to play back the recorder, see if we got any EVP. Kono and Lori want to go check out the porch.” Steve confirms and then clips the radio back to his belt, running one shaky hand down his face before turning the camera on himself.

“It’s still really heavy in here,” he tells it, raising his arm until the goosebumps are visible on the greenish night vision camera screen. “EMF’s at –” he flips the camera around to show it the Mel meter. “Nine-point-two. Hey,” he says louder. “Thank you, I asked for a sign and you gave me a good one.” He reaches out to touch the doorknob, cautious, but nothing happens; it twists open easily, revealing the empty hallway.

Steve pads backwards to sit on the edge of the bed frame again. He rummages in his pockets until he finds the device he’s looking for, a small black box with a mesh speaker on its front. “I’m gonna give the Spirit Box a try,” he says, aiming the camera at it. “The Spirit Box cycles through hundreds of radio frequencies really quickly, so it sounds like white noise. Spirits can use it to vocalize their messages, and we get to hear them in real-time, rather than waiting to replay and analyze EVP like Danny’s doing downstairs right now.” He’s given the spiel dozens of times, and saying the familiar words distracts him from the adrenaline tremor in his hands. He hopes the shaking doesn’t mess up the footage too bad. Blowing out a quiet breath, he flicks the switch, and the sound of static fills the room.

“What’s your name?” Steve asks, speaking loudly to be heard above the crackling white noise. He lets it run for a few minutes. There’s no answer, but he keeps the camera pointed at the Mel meter, which shows the temperature dropping further and the EMF reading ticking up steadily. More sweat is trickling down his back, stinging uncomfortably. He rolls his shoulders. “We know something happened here. We know about the murders. Who am I feeling right now?

 

DANNY, 10:32 PM – GUEST BEDROOM.

Steve’s the last one to make it back to base; Danny’s already passed the EVP recorder off to Chin, and Kono and Lori straggle in a few minutes into their analysis of the audio, reporting the porch to be a bust.

"We got some good bangs, cuz,” Kono’s telling Chin as Steve ducks into the relative brightness of the room. “Turned out to be a loose shutter, though.”

She and Chin do a complicated handshake that involves both slapping and fist bumping before saying, in unison, “DEBUNKED.” Danny rolls his eyes, clamping his hands over the headphones as he plays through the EVP session from the basement.   

“What’s on your shirt, boss?” Kono asks.

“I was sweating bullets,” Steve says, waving a hand dismissively. “Whatever’s in there was strong. EMF was off the charts."

Danny frowns, pausing the recording and setting the headphones aside. He circles around the others to get a closer look, dimly registers Lori and the camera moving with him. There’s a large dark patch in the center of the back of Steve’s gray shirt. When he reaches out to touch it, it’s tacky. Danny’s mouth goes dry. “Babe, that’s not sweat.”

Chin leans back in his chair to see, and before Steve can straighten, Kono’s stepping forward and yanking on the hem of the shirt, rucking it up around his armpits.

“What the fuuuuuuck,” Danny says, drawing it out. Nobody makes fun of him for swearing; Kono’s staring wide-eyed at Steve’s back, and Chin’s got a furrow between his brows.

“What? What is it?” Steve asks, hauling the shirt up over his head and twisting to try and see. He hisses a little when his movements stretch the skin. Danny clamps his hand on Steve’s shoulder to hold him still, tracing a finger over the marks lightly. His fingertip comes away bloody.

There are three long, parallel scrapes down Steve’s toned back; the middle one lies directly over the bumps of his spine. They’re almost a foot long and spaced evenly apart, bleeding sluggishly.

Like someone dug their fingers deep into his skin and _dragged_.

 

LORI, 10:40 PM – INT. HALLWAY.

The shot is shaky, slightly blurry like the camera’s zoom function is being pushed a little too far. Steve and Danny are arguing, whispering in furious tones at the opposite end of the dark hallway.

“– fine.”

“– _not_ fine, Steven –”

“– evidence we need.”

“You’ve gotta be shitting me, you didn’t even _feel_ –”

“– already told you –”

“Frankly, it’s unbelievable –”

“– lockdown.”

Danny’s finger is jabbing into Steve’s still-bare sternum, everything glowing a pale green in the night vision viewfinder. Steve reaches up and holds his hand still, scowling. He mutters something to Danny; the camera doesn’t catch it, but Danny’s face relaxes minutely and he steps back. Steve releases his hand quickly. Danny’s shoulders set and he turns away, walking down the hallway towards the camera. The frame jostles a little, his figure disappearing as Lori steps quietly back into a doorway, out of the reach of his flashlight.

Danny’s voice comes out of the dark, moving towards the front door. “If somebody dies tonight because you wouldn’t listen to me, you won’t have to worry about finding evidence of the afterlife, okay, I will put you there myself.” The door slams shut behind him.


	2. Chapter 2

DANNY, 10:57 PM – EXT. PORCH.

Danny runs a hand through his hair, pushing it back where it’s started to fall forward over his forehead. He’s looking somewhere past Lori and the camera, out into the shadowy, overgrown lawn. Frogs chirp in the thick grass. “We’ve seen some messed-up stuff before,” he says. “And, uh, normally we like the physical contact stuff, you know, it’s good, it’s not always fun but it’s great evidence. But that –” he gestures behind him. “Those aren’t scratches, or red marks. Those are _deep_.” Danny exhales shakily. “They look violent, and they look deliberate. Steve –” He breaks off. “One of the reasons I’m here is because I get vibes, right, I get feelings about things. And I’ve got a bad feeling about this one.”

 

STEVE, 11:02 PM – INT. HALLWAY.

“Danny said what? No, they don’t need _stitches_.” Steve crosses his arms, glares mutinously at the camera. “I had Kono put some duct tape on them, they’re fine.”

 

DANNY, 11:07 PM – EXT. PORCH.

“Oh, I’m too _sensitive_? That’s, that’s great, okay, well, you can just tell Steve that he’s –” Danny stops, mid-sentence, head cocking suddenly to the side. “Did you hear that?” he asks more quietly.

“Yeah, I heard it,” Lori says. “A voice. Small, really small. I think – yard?”

Danny nods, clicking on his flashlight as he moves slowly off the porch and around to the back of the house. “Might be an animal,” he says, but it doesn’t sound like he believes himself. Lori shakes her head a little, adjusting the camera as she follows him into the grass.

“Didn’t sound like any animal I’ve heard,” she says, and then frowns. “Danny – the frogs.” Danny stops, turning back to face her. The entire yard has fallen quiet; the coqui frogs, ubiquitous on the island, are silent, and even the light breeze has died down. Danny sweeps his flashlight beam over the overgrown lawn, unhooking the digital recorder from his belt and turning it on.

“Hello? Is there someone out here?”

Silence.

“My name’s Danny,” he tries again. “I just want to talk to you, okay, I’m not gonna hurt you.” The yard is quiet, just Danny and Lori breathing in the dark. After a few minutes, Lori nods towards the house.

“Let’s head back in,” she says. “We can get a spirit box, if you want.” Danny shakes his head, holding up one hand.

“I think –” he starts, and then jerks a little, stumbling backwards a step.

“Danny?”

“Lori,” he says, in a carefully controlled voice. He’s standing stock-still, arm frozen, and he slowly turns his head to look down at his right leg. “Lori, look at my pants. Do you see – ”

“Oh holy shit,” Lori says. “Yup. Uh, yeah.” The right leg of Danny’s khakis is bunched up, gathered and tugged away from his knee like someone is pulling on it.

“Jesus Christ.” Danny’s face is tight. “I know – I know what this is. Okay. Okay.” He does know. The impact of a small body against his legs, the small hand fisted in the fabric, a weight against the outside of his hip. He doesn’t need to see it. He knows what it feels like when a scared child hides.

Danny forces himself to relax, changes his tone to the one he uses when Grace wakes from a nightmare and shows up in his doorway, wide-eyed and frightened. “Emily, sweetie, it’s okay. I know you’re pretty scared right now, but there’s nothing to be afraid of, honey, I promise.”

 

DANNY, 11:29 PM – GUEST BEDROOM.

Everyone’s gathered around Lori’s camera, replaying the footage from the yard for the sixth time, except for Steve, who’s looming over Danny’s chair like it’s insulted the Navy.

“It’s definitely her,” Danny tells him. “I could feel it. She’s terrified, poor kid.” He’s rolling up the right leg of his khakis, a sinking feeling growing as the pain in his knee ratchets higher. Sure enough, when he works the fabric up, a deep bruise covers the kneecap, five small black lines expanding over the skin. Steve looks murderous.

“It’s not like it’s her fault,” Danny says, offended. “She’s five.”

“Danno,” Steve says with infinite patience, which is rich, coming from him. “She’s _dead_.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think anyone told her that.” Danny sighs, wincing when he tries flexing his leg.

“Maybe you should sit the rest of this one out,” Steve suggests. “Switch with Chin, he’s been wanting to get back in the field for a while.”

Danny laughs incredulously. “You’re hilarious, McGarrett. What, you get a friendly back-slap from Edward Scissorhands and it’s all fine, rub some dirt in it, but when I get bruised it’s game over? Not happening. Christ, stop with the face.”

Steve’s aneurysm face intensifies. Danny makes a frustrated noise. “Steve. Babe. She’s… she’s really scared, okay? I gotta try.” _If it were Grace_ , he doesn’t say.

Steve hears him anyway. “Yeah, okay. We’ll try,” he says, face softening a little. “We’re switching the lineup, though. I’m staying with you.” There’s something unreadable in Steve’s eyes, which bothers Danny because a) he’s got a pretty thorough catalogue of nearly all of Steve’s expressions and he can’t quite place this one, and b) he’s been seeing more and more of it lately.

He blinks, looking away from Steve’s gaze. “Fine by me. I want to be there to say I told you so when the infection sets in and your entire back turns green.”

 

CHIN, 12:06 AM – GUEST BEDROOM.

Chin sets one of the handheld cameras onto a tripod, checking to make sure he’s in view before he moves to sit in front of it.

“So right now,” he says, “we’re thinking we have at least two kinds of activity happening, maybe three. There’s whatever scratched Steve’s back up like that, and there’s – Danny’s pretty sure it’s Emily, the missing daughter, who he and Lori met out in the yard. And there’s the knocking in the basement that Kono and Danny heard.” He blows out a breath. Behind him, a cluster of laptop monitors display grainy x-camera footage, motionless shots of hallways and shadowy corners. “Usually, we try to put the pieces of evidence we gather together. Into something that can tell us a story.” Chin looks steadily into the camera. “I’m not sure we’re going to like this one.”

 

KONO, 12:34 AM – INT. HALLWAY.

“Lori and I are headed into the master bedroom,” Kono says as she moves carefully down the hallway. It’s pitch dark except for the weak light from her flashlight and she feels a little stupid, as always, to be narrating her movements like this. “This is the room where Steve got some really high EMF readings earlier tonight, and some pretty scary scratches.”

“And the door,” Lori reminds her.

“Yeah, and the door slammed,” Kono agrees. “So Lori and I are gonna check it out. Sometimes spirits react differently to women, which I guess means that even the afterlife can’t erase a lifetime of gender essentialism and patriarchal social conditioning.”

Behind the camera, Lori snorts. “Oh, this is nice,” she says when they reach the doorway of the bedroom. The room is wrecked and she pans the camera slowly across it, making sure to catch the rusted bed frame, the battered dresser, the shards of glass that litter the scuffed hardwood floor. Kono’s scanning the room too, her flashlight beam swinging from corner to corner. The light is on its dimmest setting, a dull green glow that won’t mess up Lori’s camera’s night vision. Still, it catches on something that glints, and Kono crosses the room and bends over to pick up a shattered picture frame half-hidden behind the dresser. She tilts it so that the cracked glass falls to the floor with a tinkling sound.

Lori leans over her shoulder, aiming the camera to get a better look. A dark-haired couple grins up at them, a sandy beach stretching out behind their tanned shoulders. The woman’s mouth is open in a wide smile, and her hand rests on the swell of her stomach, just out of frame.

Kono clears her throat quietly. “That’s Monica and William,” she says. She places the photograph gently on top of the dresser and moves to perch on the edge of the bed frame, right where Steve had been sitting three hours earlier.

Some of the other paranormal reality shows sensationalize their investigations, use dramatic words and bloody photos to exploit the tragedies of the past. Steve doesn’t go in for that, not that any of them would allow it even if he did. There are no dramatic reenactments of suicides, no cheesy graphics or overblown monologues about the secrets of the spirit world. Their producers fill the space with behind-the-scenes footage instead, stupid shots of the team goofing around, tripping over spare tripods, Danny spilling shaved ice on his shirt, close-ups of Chin’s biceps as he carries camera equipment out of the van, Lori snickering in the background as she zooms in. Kono knows it’s one of the reasons their ratings are so good; half of the viewers are paranormal enthusiasts or folks looking for a scare, but the other half tune in to watch the team itself.

She unclips the digital recorder from her belt and places it on the bed frame next to her. Then she turns off her flashlight and the room plunges into darkness. “I think we should start with an EVP session,” she says, more for the camera’s benefit than Lori’s. “Steve didn’t have any luck with the Spirit Box earlier, but there’s definitely something going on in this room. So I’m gonna ask some questions and run the digital recorder in case it captures any voices or sounds that we can’t hear with our own ears.”

She hears Lori move to the side of the room, wary of blocking the corner static cam’s line of sight. The faint glow from the handheld camera’s LED screen bobs in the blackness. “Is there anyone in here with us now?” Kono asks. She waits a long minute before trying again. “If you’re here, if you can hear me, can you give us a sign? Can you move the door again, maybe?” Nothing. “Why did you hurt our friend earlier?”

She’s opening her mouth to ask again when a small scuffing noise comes from outside the bedroom, in the hallway beyond the doorway. “Did you hear that?” she hisses to Lori.

“Yeah, I heard it.” They fall silent and, sure enough, the sound comes again, louder this time. It sounds like – “Footsteps?” Lori asks. Kono nods, knowing that Lori can see her with the camera’s LED. She gets to her feet, trying to move as softly as possible, heading for the hallway. Lori hangs back, careful to make sure she keeps Kono in frame.

“Chin, nobody else is upstairs, are they?” Kono whispers into the radio.

“No, Steve and Danny are outside,” Chin replies immediately. Kono hesitates in the doorway. The noise comes again, distinct: there’s no mistaking it for anything other than footsteps. Kono, staring into the dark, fumbles for her flashlight.

Several things happen very quickly.

At the end of the hallway, a shadow moves. Kono swears quietly and takes a full step out of the doorway. The wooden door to the bedroom slams closed behind her with impossible force.

Kono yelps in surprise, whirling around so quickly that she loses her grip on the flashlight. It goes rolling across the floor, illuminating a stretch of dirty baseboard. She hears Lori shout in alarm from where she’s shut inside the bedroom. The radio clipped to her belt erupts in noise. Kono ignores it in favor of scrambling blindly for the doorknob. When she finds it, it turns freely. The solid door doesn’t budge.

“Lori?” she calls, panicked. She pounds on it with a closed fist. “Lori, open the door.”

“I can’t!” Lori cries back. Her voice is strained. The door between them rattles like she’s pulling at it urgently. The knob turns uselessly in Kono’s hand. “Kono, I can’t get it open, what – ”

Kono moves a few steps backwards, as far as she can get in the narrow hallway, and is about to take a running start on shouldering the door open when Chin appears at the top of the stairs, moving so quickly that he almost sidechecks the wall opposite the stairwell.

“Kono, what’s going on?”

“Door slammed again. Lori’s inside, I can’t get it –” Kono normally has one of the levellest heads of them all, but right now she’s panicking, every single nerve in her body telling her to force that door open.

The door is still shuddering violently in its frame. “Lori, get back,” Chin calls out, clearly anticipating Kono’s plan.

“What?” Lori’s voice is muffled.

“Get back,” Chin repeats. “Stop shaking the door, we’re gonna break it down, you’re gonna be fine.”

“What?” Lori yells back over the frantic rattling. “I’m not shaking it! I thought Kono –”

The hallway falls abruptly silent, Lori’s shout hanging in the air. Kono can hear her own breath ringing loud in her ears, the blood rushing through her tensed body. It sounds like the ocean, like the waves coming in, and it’s almost loud enough to drown out the quiet click the door makes as it swings open untouched.

Lori is wide-eyed and pale in the light from Chin’s flashlight. Her camera is abandoned on the rusted bed frame.  She’s standing motionless, back against the far wall, a good ten feet from the door.

 

STEVE, 12:58 AM – GUEST BEDROOM

“I just want to say, holy shit,” Lori announces. “That was the craziest fucking thing that has ever happened to me, and we have seen some crazy, crazy shit.” She runs her hands through her hair; her braid has come loose, wisping wildly around her face. Steve notes that everyone has well and truly given up on all attempts to avoid profanity.

Chin twists, stretching where he’s been hunched over reviewing the static camera footage from the bedroom. His spine cracks alarmingly. On the monitor behind him, the video plays in a loop: the bedroom door slamming shut and rattling violently in its frame, Lori nowhere near it. “Well, the x-cam caught it the whole thing,” he says. “Lori’s all the way on the other side of the room. Once we sync it up with the hallway x-cam….” He doesn’t have to finish the sentence. They all know how good this footage is.

Danny crosses his arms across his chest. Lori’s not running her camera, so there’s nobody to hear but them when he says, “I think we gotta talk about this one, guys.” 

Steve frowns at him. “What’s to talk about? They’re fine. Right, guys?” He looks to Lori, who nods confidently, and to Kono, who shoots him a wild grin that speaks volumes. Then he turns back to Danny, who’s regarding him incredulously.

“Can I talk to you for a second?” He phrases it like a request, but he has Steve by the wrist and is dragging him into the darkened hallway before Steve can open his mouth to answer. “Quick question,” Danny starts, “what the hell is wrong with you, Steven?"

Steve makes a frustrated gesture. “You tell me, Danno.” 

“Okay, I’ll tell you. What’s wrong with you is that you’re treating this like it’s just another job. It’s not. This is so far from what we’re used to dealing with, okay, we are equipped for bumps in the night and maybe some temperature fluctuations, Steve, we are not the goddamn Ghostbusters. We’re in over our heads.”

“We can handle it,” Steve insists.

“Something tried to _julienne your back, Steve_ ,” Danny hisses. “And then it tried to _eat Lori_.”

“I don’t think that’s really – ” he tries.

“Stop. Just, stop.” Danny uses both hands to push his hair back, visibly taking a moment to compose himself. “I don’t want you to do your – your Super-SEAL aggression fixation thing here. Whatever’s in that bedroom is bad news, and it is way, way above our pay grade. I’m not being paranoid. I’m telling you that I – I _know_ this, okay. We do not want to mess with that room.” 

Steve gives him a searching look. He believes Danny, only in part because of whatever extra vibes Danny picks up on that the rest of them can’t. Mostly, he knows that Danny’s never backed down from a challenge in his life, so if he’s pulling them back from this, then what –

“It’s the kid,” he realizes. “You’re worried about the girl. Emily,” he corrects himself.

Danny looks away, won’t meet his eye now. “Yeah, well,” he says at last. “I know she’s dead.” His voice cracks a little on the last word, and he clears his throat. “I’ve just got a thing that says she needs – we gotta focus on her, I think."

One of Danny’s hands is rubbing distractedly at his breastbone, pressing at it like it aches. Steve isn’t even sure he knows he’s doing it.

 

STEVE, 3:43 AM – KITCHEN

“Hey Steve, come back to base.” Chin’s voice, usually measured, sounds worried. “There’s something you need to hear.”

Steve shuts the battery casing on the static cam and makes his way back to the guest bedroom. The lights are all on and he has to squint while his eyes adjust. Chin is waiting for him, brow furrowed, headphones looped around his neck.

“We’ve been processing the EVPs,” Chin tells him without preamble. “Usually we check these out later on, but the house has been pretty quiet for a few hours, so Danny and I thought we’d go through some of the digital recordings now. This one is from when Lori and Danny were out behind the house, in the yard.” He swivels around to highlight a ribbon of audio on the screen, passing the headphones to Steve. When they’re firmly clamped over his ears, Chin hits play.

There’s the usual hiss of static for a long moment. Then Lori’s voice.“Let’s head back in. We can get a spirit box, if you want.”

“I think –” Danny’s voice, louder and closer to the microphone. He sounds choked. And there – in the background –

Steve’s eyes shoot up to meet Chin’s. “Play it again,” he requests.

Listens.

“Again.”

The noise is quiet, like whoever made it doesn’t want to be heard. But it’s also unmistakable: the sound of a child crying. Quick, tearful inhales, like she can’t quite slow her terrified breathing. The sound is so real that for a moment, Steve thinks wildly – _she’s alive. There’s a little girl hiding in the forest_. Then he remembers. Emily has been dead for fifteen years; there’s no way she could have survived out there by herself. She’d be twenty now.

“Has Danny heard this?” Steve asks, slipping the headphones off and handing them back. Chin nods once, looking somber.

“Yeah, he found it. Told me to listen and then took off.” He jerks his head towards the windows that overlook the back yard and the woods beyond it. Steve claps his hand on Chin’s shoulder in thanks and then takes off, too.  

 

STEVE, 3:58 AM – EXT. BACK YARD.

Danny is sitting on the ground. Between the overgrown grass and the sweeping beam of Steve’s flashlight as he moves through the yard, he’s so well hidden that Steve almost misses him.

“ – to me, kiddo,” Danny’s saying. There’s a digital recorder clutched tightly in his hand. “I want to help you out, okay, but you’ve gotta talk to me.”

He’s not looking at Steve, even though there’s no way he could have missed his approach. Steve sits next to him, shifting until they’re pressed back-to-back. He can feel the warmth of Danny’s skin even through both their shirts, feel Danny’s steady breathing in his own lungs. Steve turns off his flashlight and plunges them both into near-darkness.

“I’m not coming back inside,” Danny says.

“Okay,” Steve replies easily.

“And I don’t – what?”

“Okay,” Steve says again. “I get it. I’m not leaving.”

 

DANNY, 4:37 AM – EXT. BACK YARD.

Danny can’t pinpoint the exact moment it happens. There’s no sudden realization, just the gradual certainty that he needs to move. He doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting there staring into the trees. An hour could have elapsed, or five minutes. At some point, the creak of the back door pierced the fog surrounding him, and he dimly registered Lori and Steve speaking, voices low.

He stands and absently notices the ache in his knee, probably from spending too long sitting on the ground. Everything about his body feels impossibly muffled, even the pain. He moves towards the tree line, then past it. “I think – yeah. I think this way.” Danny’s voice sounds strange to his own ears, thick and slow, but the noise of the woods around them is impossibly sharp. The coqui frogs, the light rustling as wind stirs the eucalyptus trees, their thin leaves turning silvery in the last of the moonlight. Grace did a project on the natural ecosystems of the islands last month, and he finds himself thinking about it as he moves forward through the sparse underbrush. 

“Where are we going, Danny?” Lori asks quietly.

“Good question,” he replies distantly. "Don't know." He doesn’t want to focus on himself, is afraid his body will stop knowing where to go if he tries. _There are over ninety species of eucalyptus_ , he thinks. _When the bark falls off, the inner trunk is sometimes rainbow-colored_. Grace had used her 72-pack of Crayola crayons to shade in the drawings on her poster.

“Danny?” Steve says, an indeterminate amount of time later. The forest is beginning to lighten around them.

Did you know that over 20% of Hawai’i’s biodiversity is located in its dry forests, is what Danny means to say. What comes out instead is a shaky breath. He stops walking. Looks down.

Something gleams against the dark loam, smooth and curved and white. Two ribs. The round moon of a skull, impossibly small.

“Lori, turn the camera off,” Steve says tightly.

Lori turns the camera off.

 

STEVE, 5:22 AM – EXT. 147 MOCKINGBIRD CT.

The sun is just beginning to rise, pale crescent moon still hanging visible above the horizon. The frogs fell silent a few hours earlier and now the air is filled with the sound of the dawn chorus: the high cooing of zebra doves and sharp trills of the brightly-colored java sparrows. In the distance, mist rises gently from the Ko’olau mountains, pink with the glow of sunrise.

Any peacefulness is shattered by the strobing red and blue lights of the two HPD cruisers in the driveway. The voices of the officers are loud in the early morning quiet. Chin stands at the edge of the tree line, one hand rubbing the back of his neck tiredly as he talks to a pair of them. Kono’s further into the woods with the other two cops, and Danny is slumped against his car, Steve’s phone pressed to his ear. Steve knows he’s talking to Grace, because he’d passed him the phone after taking his own turn. She likes to talk to both of them, especially when she knows they’ve just finished a job.

He and Danny had swapped phones, Steve borrowing Danny’s to apprise their producers of the unexpected turn the night had taken. It’ll be all over the news by morning, probably, unless the police manage to keep it quiet.

He walks out of the house. By the time he gets to the bottom of the front walk, Danny’s hanging up with Grace. He tosses Steve’s phone back to him and Steve catches it easily against his chest, underhanding Danny’s right back. Danny looks wiped, but not upset. Steve still isn’t sure what happened in the woods, and looking at Danny now, he’s not sure Danny does either. He seems fine now, however, eyes bright like they always are when he talks to his daughter.

“How’s the kid?” Steve asks, like he hadn’t just spent 20 minutes listening to her rhapsodize about pancakes in an unsubtle ploy to get breakfast for dinner.

“She’s fine. And she wants IHOP when we pick her up from school later.”

“So I hear,” says Steve. He steels himself. “Danny, I – I did a thing, and I don’t know if you’re gonna like it.”

“Try me.” The growing light limns Danny’s hair in gold, paints the shadows under his eyes a bruised-looking blue, and Steve is so, so tired. It’s five o’clock in the morning. He wants to go home, drink exactly two Longboards, and fall asleep listening to the surf, possibly for the rest of the year.

“I erased the footage.”

“What?”

“I erased the footage,” Steve repeats. He’s not going to apologize. “And the EVP. Just now. I just – not all of it, but probably enough to scrap the episode. They wanted to run it, you should have heard how goddamn _excited_ Dennis sounded. They were going to sensationalize it, there’s no way they’d let something this big go, and I didn’t –”

“Wow,” Danny says, cutting him off. There’s a small, quirked smile on his face, getting bigger the longer Steve looks. “Equipment failure is the worst. Someone should really look into that.”

 _Not mad_ , Steve thinks in relief. Danny’s looking at him with the familiar fond expression Steve’s come to take for granted, eyes crinkled at the corners, something a little wondering about it. Steve is abruptly and pathetically grateful for it, grateful for the way their shoulders brush where they stand in the cracked driveway amongst the weeds and the police cruisers. The sun is rising and Danny’s smiling up at him like that and he’s tired, tired and so grateful for all of it that he feels unsteady.

And then Danny’s mouth is on his, hot and strong, Danny’s broad hands framing his face, a thumb stroking over one cheekbone. Danny Williams kisses him, right there in front of the java sparrows, the HPD officers, God, the sun, and everybody.

Steve reaches out and holds on.


End file.
